/agreed
Sometimes, when reading on or hearing of people I don't approve of, I'll drop a pejorative 'who?' even though I've got a pretty good idea who said person is.
Not this time.
This time I haven't got a clue as to who this 'Rap Genius' is.
Not sure I want to know either.

Summary of the video: * Rap Genius is a website that provides crowdsourced text annotation services. * It got it's name because it originally provided "decoding" of rap lyrics so little Joe Schmoe could figure out what "beez in the trap" means.* But now they want to provide text annotation to documents of all kinds of subjects.

1) Popularity does not always equal quality, but I never claimed it had to be quality. You said it took no talent therefore anyone can do it.2) I never claimed talking = music. I consider rap to be more akin to poetry. But you will find rap in the music charts, along with many other "artists" a lot of people also consider to not have any talent.3) You're claiming it takes no talent and with a payout like that why wouldn't you? Unless of course it does tak

That is about as bigoted as, "Geeks are people that have no social skills, yet still insist on pushing their electronic 'tools' on people. It is hardly possible to be more arrogant and incompetent as a human."

I don't particularly enjoy rap, but it is evidently a musical form, and - just as with any art - doing it badly is easy, but doing it well is hard.

The "I'm smart and don't like X, so people who like X must be stupid" mentality on here is getting near YouTube levels. I've recently switched to ArsTechnica for most of my news, but still have the/. RSS feed which I monitor and occasionally click through. This article struck me as interesting because I ended up at Rap Genius yesterday after searching for some lyrics to a rap song.

Just my point. I also believe that quite a few "Rappers" are actually pretty competent scam artists that use bogus "cultural identity" memes to sell their trash. Seems to be working well. There is a sucker born every minute...

Just my point. I also believe that quite a few "Rappers" are actually pretty competent scam artists that use bogus "cultural identity" memes to sell their trash. Seems to be working well. There is a sucker born every minute...

A lot like the wrestling shows on TV, a guy making money by portraying himself as somebody he isn't to sell their trash

OK, I'll bite. Treat yourself to a little "Gilbert and Sullivan". A very famous example lyric is the Major-General's Song [wikipedia.org], which is very cleverly triple-rhymed. (Let's see Eminem top that!) It has inspired a host of parodies, one of which is so well done as to merit a Wikipedia entry of its very own [wikipedia.org].

And Sullivan's music is every bit as brilliant as Gilbert's lyrics. Once you get over the fat lady's singing, G&S truly is one of the good things in life. The recordings by the Welsh National Opera ar

I really like Eminem and Kid Rock. They are sarcastic and very funny. Will they still have the same appeal after 100 years? I doubt it. Gilbert and Sullivan has endured.

I don't especially like G&S (I prefer what someone else called "traditional arias" e.g. full chorus "Ode to Joy"), yet I can completely relate to, understand why you are fond of G&S. A live G&S performance is music and art.

Even if I accept your premise that rap is "bad music", I have heard rap that is very good poetry. It takes a skilled linguist to write good rap as it does to write good poetry and there are good and bad examples of both. To me rap is modern day poetry with a beat. look outside the pop charts for the good stuff and you will find it.

...It takes a skilled linguist to write good rap as it does to write good poetry and there are good and bad examples of both.

Linguist! The professors of linguistics that write University of Pennsylvania's Language Log are skilled linguists. I don't think that has anything to do with their ability to write poetry. Or rap, although it would be fun to ask!

Rap is words, music and visuals with attitude, and usually post-production effects. Poetry is written words on a page. They aren't comparable.

Before either poetry or rap is spoken aloud they can both be words written on a page. Both can also not be written on a page. The page is just a recording medium. or can poetry not be recorded on a CD and still be considered poetry?

It does not lack the basic elements of "music" if you accept it's common meaning, nor does it "discard every core element" of it. And it does indeed happen to be "subjetively good" to some and "subjectively bad" to others. So that point didn't really make sense if you still want to agree it's objectively bad. Unless you don't accept that some people actually find it good.

Taking into consideration this post and the first anonymous troll post that went in this direction, that you probably also wrote:
It's impossible to draw the conclusion that something is "objectively bad" based on subjective statements like a component of it "being rubbish" or "sounding like utter shit". You're trolling, but you know, I like it when "low hanging fruit" helps making a very simple and objectively non-refutable point. (See what I did there?)
Also, lyrical content is not really genre specific

As with any art form, there are good practitioners and bad practitioners of the art, and the lyrics to rap range from the downright awful to the absolutely brilliant. And the skill of the delivery ranges from the clumsy to the sublime. As with anything else in life.

And when it comes to harmony, there is plenty of it in rap come to think of it. Basically, when rappers ride the be

I'm not a real fan of Rap either, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its place or that it sin't high art in some way. When it first appeared I thought that sometimes it was quite poetic, even with all the dialect and swearing, and like any art form that is current, most of it is pretty hum drum,

What caught my eye is that the application that got Rap Genius in trouble was a linguistics application. I wonder, really, what arm twisting Google was able to do to get Rap Genius to change what it was do

I've been in the computing industry since the 1970s. I've seen trends come, and I've seen trends go. I've seen people come, I've seen people go. I've seen companies come, I've seen companies go. I've seen technologies come, I've seen technologies go.

But over these several decades of experience, the worst, and I mean the very worst, people I've ever had to deal with are the hipsters that have weaseled their way in since 2008 or so. They've advocated for some of the worst technologies we've ever seen (JavaScr

For one thing, static typing is like having unit tests that your compiler automatically writes for you. It automatically catches certain classes of program defects before your program even starts running. For another, sometimes you do have to count bits when you're trying to squeeze 10,000 concurrent HTTP or HTTPS connections [wikipedia.org] on one server.

"Rap Genius" is a misleading and silly name for what, transcription software like DragonWriter? Actually, it might not even be that good (all I read about lately are Internet piecework/ sweatshops that are supposedly "social" and "democratizing"...except they aren't).

I know that Mark Andreessen funded it, but he isn't right about everything.

What I hate about the internet today - by Gus1. SEO - it's obvious2. The Cloud - security nightmare3. Advertisements - pay for your own site, or get it off the internet. You're not doing anyone any favors4. Social websites - facebook, twitter, google+, you all suck5. Youtube - posting a 10 minute video explaining how to do something that you could have explained in 1 line of text6. Web Forums - mail lists are better, you losers7. IOT - I don't even want to hear about this, it's fucking ridiculous8. Please

Google has a right to do whatever it wants. This is a fact. It is a private firm, and if it wants to put up goatse.cx every time someone types in BING that is their right. I would defend it. However, such abuse would indicate they are not the right firm to depend for our internet searches, as does this event.

My understanding is that if someone typed in Rap Genius the site would not come up. This to me is simply unprofessional behavior on the side of Google. Yes, demote the ranking if someone uses ano

google searches are near worthless. most others are also the same, but google is supposed to be 'great'. they once were. they no longer are.

you mean to tell me that with all the genius power and funding google has, they can't weed out the link farms and fake sites that end up at the top of the search? I look for tech info and mostly I get SALES, SALES, SALES!! we want to sell things. we don't want to give info away.

You clearly aren't a developer who needs quick answers to edge-case problems which have affected a hangful of other people (including your client), or someone stalking their...uh...forget that - go with the programmer thingy.

He was modded redundant because it's bullshit. In the same breath, he complains about useless results due to spam as well as Google's attempt to stop people making the results useless due to spam. And apparently Google's algorithms are "broken" because they "created" a problem, namely SEO manipulation. But then he goes on to explain that AltaVista was subject to SEO manipulation as well. And he's condemning Google for attempting to fix it, while blaming them for being unable to! After using this silly logic

I think my cable company told me basically the same thing when I cut them out of my life 8 years ago, for so much advertizing. Turns out, there's a big push for getting rid of advertizing these days, by many folks. I guess you could get with the fine folks over at Netflix and see if they agree.

You may also be able to get with the folks at slashdot, like 10 years ago. Each article used to draw in at least 350 responses. These days, looks like 100 is about average, 350 is going to have something to do

this maybe because the tech that was once newsworthy is not anymore. Either not a breaktrough or even so it is so complicated and/or sophisticated that nobody (i.e. fewer than 10 indihviduals) understands. It was once possible to write tools that mattered on your own - what was it last time when it happened?Looking at different angle - the geeky stuff about say obfuscated C code - how many answers does that get? All the allure and all the geeks are gone. Only some stubborn autists are still out there thinki